pudge's Journal: Discussion Updates

If you have the "I am willing to help test Slashdot's New Discussion System" checked, you get two cool new features today.

First is that you get a pair of neat CSS/JS sliders in place of the old box with arrows on it. Drag them up and down and you see how many comments are available at each "threshold." Let go and the page updates to match your selection.

The other is that if a comment is hidden, it is not put into the page, to save on initial page load. The comment is then loaded on demand via Ajax. If you started with 0 hidden comments, slide the sliders to show greater-than-zero hidden comments, then reload to get a new version of the page. Then drag the slider back down to reveal the hidden coments. You'll see a "Loading ... Please wait" text pop up under the slider box as the comments load in. Same thing if you click "$n hidden comments" text to reveal the hidden comments: if they are not already loaded in, they are fetched, on demand.

So

[GMontag]

So, this is more stuff to slow down my puney little computer-in-a-big-box?

Re:

[pudge]

No. If anything, it gives you tools to improve your performance, by letting you set your thresholds high so less is loaded in, which saves bandwidth AND cpu.

Re:

[GMontag]

Juicy!*

When are they going to do a plain-text option? How about Lynx compatability?

*Used without permission from SamTheButcher

Re:

[tqft]

Last time I tried with IE6 - work machine so patched however they want - it wasn't real happy.

I know someone (you or CmdrTaco) made a comment that IE was a work in progress with it.

Any news on that front?

Re:

[pudge]

MSIE 6 is unlikely to ever work. MSIE 7 we keep testing here and there, but have not been actively working on it: we do know the JavaScript mostly works, but that the CSS has some pretty major problems. CSS is easier to fix than JavaScript. :-) But as to MSIE 6, it simply does not support much of what we do, and unless someone else comes along and shows us how (patches welcome, really) to make it work without making a ton of changes, we will move ahead with supporting MSIE 7, but won't devote resources t

Re:

[tqft]

Am testing it form home right now
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9a2pre) Gecko/20061221 Minefield/3.0a2pre ID:0000000000 [cairo]

ie latest trunk of ff, built from cvs about 3 hours ago (ie gecko 1.9)

Other than having to wait for the page to finish loading for it to be of any use, it is pretty good.

A little clunky on a big page but that could be alpha status of browser or just all the overhead of a few hundred comments.

Re:

[pudge]

That's kinda the point of the new on-demand comment loading. If you find your browser is a bit slow etc., set your thresholds higher with the slider, and subsequent pages will load fewer comments on initial load, thus giving you better performance.

I must say...

[TechnoLust]

for all the things that people bitch about on the dot, I'm liking the new discussion system changes. So is this some of your handywork?

Re:

[pudge]

for all the things that people bitch about on the dot, I'm liking the new discussion system changes. So is this some of your handywork?

Glad you like it. Yeah, I did a lot of it. I've done most of the JavaScript/AJAX and backend changes, and scc did the new slider, and tvroom did a bunch on the previous slider, and some other stuff. Wes did a lot of CSS work. And of course, CmdrTaco did most of the concept/direction.

Re:

[TechnoLust]

Well your shit seems to be working great. The slider works well too, but frankly, it could be a little prettier. :-)

And I have to give Taco credit for the concept, much better than the previous model.

Re:

[pudge]

Well your shit seems to be working great. The slider works well too, but frankly, it could be a little prettier. :-)

Thanks. And things will get prettier. :-)

Nice....

[Kymermosst]

I haven't been paying attention to the new comment system lately. Definitely a bit cooler than clicking arrows... nice work.

I don't know...

[FroMan]

I don't know if this is the right place to ask for features, and I am sure the idea could be explained better, but I'll toss it in here anyways.

I like the nested comment view. However, I would like to see all +X comments on the page. I could turn on the re-parent option, but then I lose the context of the discussion. So, instead of re-parenting the comment, it would be nice if all parent comments that do not meet the threshold would be shown anyways.

• comment 1, level 1, +1 unmoderated
• • comment 2, level 2

Re:

[pudge]

To my mind, the difference between "threshold" and "highlight threshold" takes care of this. If you keep your highlight threshold one or two greater than your threshold, then you at least get comments 1 and 3 in "abbreviated"/"oneline" mode, and if you really want to read it, just click on it. If you don't, well, that's fine too.

Anyway, feel free to send that suggestion to cmdrtaco @ this site. If he likes the idea, he'll ask me to implement it. :)